Positivism
Abandoning the search for first and final causes to seek only the laws of phenomena, and making that sobriety the principle of a reorganization of society.
c. 1830 – c. 1881
A doctrine founded by , formerly 's secretary, in his (1830-1842). Comte sought to close the crisis opened by the Revolution, which the critique of the had prepared by ruining the old order without founding a new one: he meant to build on science an intellectual order as solid as that of the medieval Church. He ranked the sciences from mathematics to biology and coined, to crown them, the word "sociology". In the System of Positive Polity (1851-1854) he drew a religion of Humanity from it. This religion split his followers: , who had popularized the doctrine, rejected the political and religious programme of Comte's later work (the cult, the spiritual power, the temporal dictatorship), but kept his philosophy of science and the ambition of a republican, secular politics grounded in sociology. The period covered here ends with Littré's death (1881); the orthodox positivism of and the Positivist Church of Brazil carried it on, and it was under the influence of Brazilian positivists that Brazil's national flag adopted the motto "Order and Progress" in 1889. The movement also left its mark on and on the republican school system of the Third Republic. The of the Vienna Circle took over its name and its anti-metaphysical spirit, not its doctrine.
The only real knowledge is that of the laws linking phenomena: to seek first or final causes is to remain in the childhood of the mind.
The human mind necessarily passes through three stages, theological, metaphysical and then positive, and this law of intellectual development also governs the history of societies.
Society is not a sum of individuals: it is an organism with laws of its own, which only a new science, sociology, can know.
Justification
does not deny that there are causes; he observes that the mind does not reach them, and that every time it claimed to, it fell into division. The replaces the search for causes with the search for laws, constant relations between phenomena that make prediction possible: from science comes prevision; from prevision comes action. This is no naive empiricism, for every observation already presupposes a theory to guide it. In his later work, however, Comte subordinates science to the "heart" and to the religion of Humanity, and denounces the fragmentation of knowledge through specialization. He recognizes no other path to knowledge, but he denies science the right to set its own ends, which keeps him just short of the extreme pole of .
Comte, Course in Positive Philosophy, lectures 1 and 2 · Comte, Discourse on the Positive Spirit (1844) · Comte, System of Positive Polity, I (1851), preliminary discourse
Justification
The describes the development of the intellect: each domain of knowledge passes from the , which explains by wills, to the , which explains by abstract entities, and then to the . The sciences reach it at different times, from astronomy to sociology, the latest to arrive. Because institutions rest on beliefs, this law also governs social history. names as his precursor , who already sought to ground progress in historical regularities, and makes progress a necessary law of the mind. The crisis of his time is then explained: the metaphysical stage, a critical one, destroyed the old order without being able to build a new one.
Comte, Course in Positive Philosophy, lecture 1 · Comte, Plan of the Scientific Work Necessary for the Reorganization of Society (1822)
Justification
distinguishes social statics, the study of order, from social dynamics, the study of progress. Both bear on wholes: the family, not the individual, is the elementary social unit, and , not the isolated man, is the real being one must start from. Against the Enlightenment , he wants a society held together by shared functions and beliefs, not by individual rights, which he deems metaphysical.
Comte, Course in Positive Philosophy, lectures 47-50 · Comte, System of Positive Polity, II
Justification
In his last works, coined the word to name the end of positive morality: living for others. Sociology shows that the individual owes everything to Humanity; morality draws from this the duty to subordinate the selfish inclinations to the sympathetic ones. This morality is bound up with the cult of Humanity, which rejects: the position belongs first to Comte and to orthodox positivism.
Comte, System of Positive Polity, I · Comte, The Catechism of Positive Religion (1852)
Justification
The religion of Humanity is a religion without God: its object of worship is the , formed of the dead, the living and those yet to be born whose contribution advances the human order. Yet refuses the word , which seems to him still to answer a metaphysical question.
Comte, The Catechism of Positive Religion (1852) · Comte, System of Positive Polity, IV
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↓ Influence exerted
- challenged byLebensphilosophieLebensphilosophie was built against the positivist model of a knowledge that knows only laws: Dilthey refused to apply Comte's and Mill's method to the human sciences, and Bergson set the intuition of duration against…Read
- reinterpreted byLogical positivismThe Vienna Circle's manifesto (1929) lists Comte among its precursors, alongside Hume and Mill.Read